Um, yes Dahua and Hikvision do a better job at night time because they will adhere to the settings you put into the camera....
You may be about the only one that says Reolink customer support is top notch LOL. They are responsive, I will give them that.
So Reolink, and many consumer grade cameras and almost every cloud based camera, know that the naive consumer favors a bright static image, so the firmware is written to provide that. That comes at a cost of poor motion at night - the blur city and missing bodies of Reolinks LOL.
This is what you are experiencing.
These cameras may let you "set" the parameters, but the camera will override any user settings the the camera believes are in error because those cameras algorithms are written to provide a nice, bright,
STATIC image over anything else. I have a cheaper camera that lets me "set" the shutter. If I set a shutter for 1/10,000 at night, the image should be pitch black. But nope, the image still looks nice and bright because the cheapo camera internally says "user error on the shutter speed" and makes it what it wants it to be for a nice bright image...
Let's take a look at capturing plates at night. Whether you make the FPS 1FPS or 1,000 FPS, if the shutter isn't right, it won't get the plate. At night, we have to run a very fast shutter speed (1/2,000) and in B/W with IR and the image will be black. All you will see are head/tail lights and the plate. Some people can get away with color if they have enough street lights, but most of us cannot. Here is a representative sample of plates I get at night of vehicles traveling about 45MPH at 175 feet from my Dahua 2MP 5241-Z12E camera running 8 FPS with a shutter speed of 1/2000:
So Reolink will brighten the image and how is that done, by slowing the shutter, regardless of what someone may set. It will also up gain, brightness, and other parameters to give that great static image, but then motion is a blur.
You cannot set a reolink to get the image above because it will favor a bright images as the firmware says "stupid user doesn't realize a shutter that fast will be a black image."
Here is a recent example someone posted from a Reolink that is similar to yours, except they have incredible visible light and streetlights. Here is a freeze frame capture from their camera of a vehicle traveling about 15ish MPH under the streetlight, so about as ideal as you can get. Looking at this picture one would think it was middle of the day because they have so much light, but it was middle of the night 1am. Look at all that blur. I can tell it is a white car, but cannot tell make/model or if it is even a 2 or 4 door.
I have nowhere near that light quality at night (look how long the shadow is of this vehicle compared to the tiny shadow of the vehicle in this image that is basically underneath the vehicle because they have so much light). Here is a capture from my camera at middle of the night 2am with no streetlights and just the floodlights off my house at about 15ish MPH:
I can make out color, how many doors, make, model, etc.
The only way this is possible is by having a camera with the proper focal length for the distance one wants to cover, proper MP/sensor ratio, and a camera where you can manually change the parameters and the camera actually adheres to your settings.
I will say that vehicle capture at night is one of the most difficult captures to get, but you can certainly get better than your image with a real camera. This is a car traveling 45MPH. I prefer color so I am willing to sacrifice a little blur since I have a camera setup to capture plates. I could get a cleaner image running infrared, but I prefer to run color.
It is worth repeating....Many cameras like Reolinks and other cheapo cams let you "set" the parameters, but the camera will override any user settings the the camera believes are in error because those cameras algorithms are written to provide a nice, bright,
STATIC image over anything else, but that comes at a cost of blurred motion at night.